SUMMARY: This article introduces basic income as a concept to readers and says that its an idea that’s gaining an unlikely alliance of supporters.
Ben Schiller, “A Universal Basic Income Is The Bipartisan Solution To Poverty We’ve Been Waiting For” Fast Company. March 16, 2015.
Former bishop Zephania Kameeta and prominent advocate for basic income was just appointed Minister of a new Ministry for Poverty Alleviation.
A new hope that basic income will eventually be implemented by the government is raising in Namibia as the newly elected President Hage Geingob has committed to fight poverty and has designated former bishop of the Lutheran Church of Namibia and longtime basic income supporter Zephania Kameeta as minister of a new Ministry Department solely dedicated to Poverty Alleviation.
The new President Hage Geingob won the presidential elections with 87% of the vote on 28 November 2014. He belongs to the ruling Center-left SWAPO party which also won the parliamentary elections with a comfortable 80% majority.
Zephania Kameeta is known to be one of the pioneers of the Basic Income Grant (BIG) Coalition which started a worldwide known basic income experiment in the rural town of Otjivero in 2007. He even influenced the German Protestant Church in their move in support for basic income, BIEN Germany’s Ronald Blaschke reminded in a recent blog post. Kameeta has repeatedly pushed the government to step forward the idea.
Namibia’s new president, Hage Geingob is also one of the few leaders of the country who is interested in basic income. He openly supported the idea when he was Trade and Industry Minister and was among the first persons to donate to the BIG pilot project fund in August 2007.
“Poverty is a curse, I would therefore like government to take up the proposal of the Council of Churches of Namibia and pay out a basic income grant to all Namibians who do not have a source of income,” Geingob said in the National Assembly in 2007.
Although no announcement has been yet made about basic income by the new government, the political moves foster hope that BIG might be a step closer to becoming a national reality in Namibia. The idea already seems to show strong support among its citizenry, with more than 78% of Namibians supporting the idea of the Basic Income Grant, a recent opinion poll concluded.
Uhuru Dempers, a development activist who campaigns for BIG, told national media New Era that a ministry for poverty eradication is a positive development. “We hope that with the coming on board of Kameeta, there will be a debate on BIG as one of the models of addressing poverty,” said Dempers.
Credit picture: CC The Lutheran World Federation
Coulter’s article argues that low-wage work like that in slaughterhouses is detrimental to animal rights, and that poverty plays a direct role in continuing the factory farm culture of the food industry. Coulter then states that a basic income could lead people out of poverty and out of such damaging jobs.
Kendra Coulter, “Love Animals? Support Poverty Eradication and Humane Jobs”, Huffington Post, 3 March 2015.
Tony Fitzpatrick, Climate Change and Poverty: A new agenda for developed nations, Policy Press, 2014, x + 259 pp, hbk, 1 44730 087 8, £70, pbk, 1 44730 086 1, £24.99
Tony Fitzpatrick’s claim in this book is that climate change turns the tackling of poverty into a new agenda, for developed countries as well as for developing ones, because in developed countries such as the UK climate change exacerbates poverty and poverty has an impact on climate change.
The author defines poverty as:
a form of injustice, denoting a relative lack of those resources needed to ensure a minimal standard of living, equal opportunities, mutual social respect and participative inclusion in a society’s way of life, and without which it is difficult to flourish, to fulfil one’s potential and to achieve or sustain a decent level of wellbeing. Poverty is characterised by socioeconomic conditions that empower those who monopolise key resources at the expense of those who do not, such that poor individuals are disrespected by, for instance, being held responsible for social circumstances they did not create and over which they have limited control. (pp.11-12)
Fitzpatrick therefore parts company with a ‘capabilities’ approach to poverty, which regards as context-specific the capabilities required by someone if they are to experience such basic ‘functionings’ as sufficient food, shelter and health. Fitzpatrick’s argument is that both social and natural environments require a ‘just distribution of material and economic resources’ (pp.25, 34). It is adequate resources that make capabilities possible.
Fitzpatrick again links the natural with the social when he defines ‘ecosocial poverty’ as
falling below some decent minimum access to, ownership of and control over key socionatural resources due to malfunctioning social institutions and systems. (p.53)
Socionatural resources, such as land, take up space, so
ecosocial poverty implies an ecospatial deprivation, that is, an alienation and exclusion from (1) the socionatural resources dispersed across space, and (2) space as a distinct resource that shapes the life course of individuals and the value and distributions of those socionatural resources. (p.73)
Similarly, ecosocial poverty is time poverty: time overcontrolled by others, or time of poor quality, characterised by enforced inactivity or by lousy jobs. Fragmented space and time are at the heart of the ecosocial poverty that Fitzpatrick is discussing.
The second part of the book tackles particular ecosocial policies: energy and fuel poverty (both transitions to renewable energy sources and the protection of poor people’s access to energy are essential); food and food poverty (health-promoting regulation of the food industry is required, not denigration of the poor for unhealthy eating habits); land, housing, urban density, transport, flooding, and waste (rent-seeking in the property market has created both urban sprawl and housing poverty, and land value tax could be part of the solution); air and water quality ( – complex issues: any expansion of water-metering will require that poor people should be protected; and both air pollution and climate change can and should be tackled together).
Fitzpatrick’s conclusion is that ecosocial poverty
is something that can only be addressed through new forms of economic organisation and growth which are socially inclusive and egalitarian, deriving from renewable, low carbon sources of energy and dedicated to the restoration of natural environments that have been destroyed or eroded in the modern era. (p.214)
While Fitzpatrick’s agenda in this book is the resources that take up space, our access to those resources is mediated through a financial system, the characteristics of which influence the different levels and types of access to those resources that different people enjoy or suffer.
Any readers who wish to pursue that related agenda might with profit refer to the same author’s Freedom and Security: An introduction to the Basic Income debate (Macmillan, 1999), where he recommends ‘a Green policy package’ that would ‘include not only [a Citizen’s Income] but also land and energy taxes, working-time reductions and the expansion of informal exchanges in the third sector’, with the Citizen’s Income seen not as one of a number of ingredients, but as ‘the instrument by which that package is constructed in the first place’ (Freedom and Security, p.201).
Readers might also appreciate a recent essay by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett: A Convenient Truth: A better society for us and the planet (Fabian Society, 2014) in which they connect environmental sustainability and greater economic equality. In their view the required sustained increases in equality could be generated by greater workplace democracy, but they also recommend both a Citizen’s Income and a land value tax.
Both social justice and environmental sustainability are essential. Both deserve more discussion, and they deserve to be discussed together. Both Fitzpatrick’s and Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s recent books will help us to do that.
This article begins, “It sounds like something from a Utopian novel, but for five years, a small Canadian city ensured basic incomes for everyone. And for five years, poverty vanished…”
Lane Anderson, “What can we learn from a town that beat poverty.” Desert News National, January 5, 2015
Feng Yu, Getty Images/Hemera via Desert News National
